There is no line of demarcation between government and big business in Nigeria. Most of the so-called billionaires can actually be dismissed in what is known in Igbo parlance as “Otimkpu”! The businessmen are quite simply praise-singers of any government in power. It is therefore not difficult to understand that literally all the businessmen in Nigeria are card-carrying members of the so-called biggest political party in Africa, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Of course anytime there is any PDP fundraiser the government approved billionaires are all over the place purporting to donate billions in furtherance the party’s 60-year planned rule over Nigeria.
Just check out the list of the bank debtors who have just been published by the new Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. It reads like the who’s who of PDP donors, a cultic group that must continue to grip the hapless country by the jugular for all of 60 years of election rigging, godfather oaths and “Unoka” billionaires. For anybody who does not know of Unoka it is necessary to read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to get the gist of Okonkwo’s debtor father who drew lines on the wall to depict the many debts he owed instead of actually paying back the debts!
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Talk of PDP’s much-advertised plot to rule Nigeria for 60 years makes one to remember that its chief proponent, Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, was actually borrowed from the rival All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP)! Yes, it is so like the PDP to build its house on mere straw. Ogbulafor contested the governorship of Abia State under the ANPP flag before he was invited “to come and chop” in the PDP, and he has been living up to the billing by marshalling the PDP billionaires in the task of building a modern day Tower of Babel, otherwise known as the party’s planned new headquarters.
As things stand, any businessman who does not show up in the PDP bazaar is promptly de-listed from the government’s form book of approval. Elsewhere, business is about enterprise; here it is gauging the political barometer every new second. These ill-assorted billionaires spend more time flying in airplanes to the seat of power in Abuja than in venturing into the vast countryside for business opportunities. Living in the bondage of power, these fellows ought to hear the ancient words of Horace: “He will always be a slave, who does not know how to live upon a little.”
Given the poverty all over the nation these showy billionaires put themselves out at every turn to be celebrated. Not me; being a poor poet who has no time for wealth, social position and class I see all of them as actually being paralyzed and thus in perpetual need of aid; whence their pathetic embrace of transient power. Christopher Reeve who acted the role of Superman with aplomb before becoming paralyzed said shortly before his death: “Some people are walking around with full use of their bodies and they are more paralyzed than I am.” Of course any man who makes creative contributions to society as Christopher Reeve made until he breathed his last would always be more alive and kicking than palace placemen playing at entrepreneurship.
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Enterprise ought to be rooted in opening up opportunities. What we have here is the courting of the government by these fronts in the vain hope of achieving monopolies of sorts. All sorts of waivers are offered the juggernauts by the government, a government that should be more interested in the common cause. One of the more celebrated billionaires indeed told yours truly that he was so powerful that any time a past military regime deigned to devalue the country’s currency he was always informed well in advance! All he then needed to do to quadruple his billionaire status was to buy all the foreign currencies in sight before the currency devaluation date. That is how the rulers of Nigeria help to grow business in these shores – by multiplying the loot of their fronts at the expense of the entire people of the country!
When the government thus talks of the private sector one cannot but laugh. The so-called private sector is actually more public than the government. The billionaires advertise their going public in the manner in which you see any ramshackle so-called private school putting up a signboard to advertise itself as “Government-approved”. These billionaires wear their own signs on their foreheads. All their names should bear the suffix “GAB” which stands for “Government Approved Billionaires”.
I started out by positing that the government approved billionaires can be likened to what is known as “otimkpu” in the eastern part of the country. The otimkpu phenomenon soared during the infamous era of the 419 boom that characterized the disastrous General Babangida regime. A typical otimkpu is a hanger-on, a glorified area boy who does nothing else save to sing the praises of the rich man of the moment. They were well celebrated in the music of the late Oliver de Coque. Our government-approved billionaires are exactly of this make, singing the praise-songs of all manners of cretins in power and smiling all the way to the so-called consolidated banks that have now fallen apart. Their idea of business is simply to court power and serve as rent-seeking wastrels. I have more respect for the local trader in Jankara market than the business types who serve as lickspittles to those in power and cannot add any value to the mores of the nation. In short, I hereby stop wasting my very dear prose on them. Period.
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